Footage of forgotten Michael Jackson Sega video game discovered at car boot sale
Rare footage of a Sega video game featuring none other than Michael Jackson has been unearthed at a car boot sale. Footage of the live-action game with the King of Pop at its helm had been thought to have been lost to the annals of time, but it looks now like the artefact has been saved from such a tragic fate.
The game was initially released in 1993 under the name Scramble Training and is considered something of a hybrid between an arcade-style shooter and an interactive rollercoaster. It had been made for the Sega World theme parks, and Jackson was employed to narrate its players’ journeys.
After all, Jackson had a relationship with Sega throughout his professional career. The Japanese game developers made several video games based on Wacko’s 1988 film Moonwalker. Yuji Naka of Sega’s Sonic Team revealed earlier this year that the pop icon had also contributed music to Sonic The Hedgehog 3.
After discovering the footage from Scramble Training on an old tape initially labelled ‘Sega AS-1 (Michael Jackson Vers)’ being sold by a relative of a former Sega employee, a fan group of the game developers and the Oxford Duplication Centre extracted the video files and uploaded them to YouTube and an online archive.
The game is so rare that this newfound footage is the only video example of Scramble Training known in existence. It features audio recordings in both English and Japanese, although many of the features of the actual gameplay remain a mystery. Regardless of the quality of the actual game, it’s something of a miracle that such a peculiar artefact has been unearthed from the shadows and preserved (hopefully) for all eternity.
If you’re keen to see Michael Jackson direct you on a bizarre journey, check out the full video below.
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